Monthly Archives: May 2014

Of course, Sherlock isn’t dead! Conan Doyle was forced to ‘resurrect’ him in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ when it became clear that the public were not happy doing without their hero. I’m sure you know the story. Holmes comes again to Watson after three years’ absence in the Spring of 1894 and the tough ex-military doctor faints with the shock. When he recovers, he exclaims, “‘Holmes!… Is it really you? Can it indeed be that you are alive? Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?’” He even grips Holmes’ arm to check that he is not a spirit. It is described almost like one of the resurrection appearances of Christ. Holmes then explains all about how he escaped Moriarty at the Reichenbach Fall. And as well as a joyful reunion, Holmes and Watson are now also able to solve the case of the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair and capture the crack shot who has been stalking Sherlock. Watson is thrilled to be with his great friend again and be in an adventure: “it was indeed like old times.”

It would seem that we too are not willing to let Sherlock Holmes die, or to just be a character on the page or TV. And the good people of Meiringen in Switzerland have been doing their bit to keep the character alive, with the help of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. And the Sherlock Holmes Society of Switzerland is actually called ‘the Reichenbach Irregulars’, founded in 1989.

In Meiringen, as I found on my trip this week, it is impossible to avoid the influence and ‘presence’ of Conan Doyle’s creation. There is a wonderful life-size brass statue in the centre of the town

Conan Doyle Place in Meiringen

in the aptly named Conan Doyle Place

The back of the Park Hotel du Sauvage

outside the hotel where Conan Doyle (and Holmes and Watson) stayed,

Sherlock pub in Meiringen

there are pubs named after Sherlock,

Sherlock Holmes Hotel, Meiringen

and a Sherlock Holmes Hotel and restaurant, where we had a coffee and a fantastic view

View from the Sherlock Holmes Hotel

of one of the many mountains surrounding Meiringen in brilliant sunshine.

Sherlock chocolates!

There were Sherlock chocolates in the town’s many sweet and cake shops (although no Sherlock-themed meringues that I saw, even though Meiringen is supposed to be where meringues originate).

Sitting outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum

The main joy was the wonderful Sherlock Homes Museum, with a much better than expected range of artifacts and displays, including police uniforms from both the London and the Meiringen police forces of the 1890s.

The interior of the English Church

Sadly it is in what was the English Church, now unused as such, although one can still enjoy it as a piece of neo-gothic architecture from 1891.

A large part of the joyful atmosphere created at the Museum is due to the wonderful Marlyse Dettmar who has been looking after the collection for around 15 years and is now in her eighties, I believe, and is full of a bubbling enthusiasm and kindness, as well as speaking perfect English, of course.

1st May Opening Day at the Sherlock Holmes Museum

She and her team are volunteers and were so kind as to open up the museum especially for our group on our arrival, so we could visit it on the same day as seeing the Reichenbach Falls. We were also there for the official 1st of May opening day of the season.

In the original story, Mrs Hudson the landlady understandably had “violent hysterics” at the re-appearance of Holmes. And Sherlock found that his brother Mycroft “had preserved my rooms and my papers exactly as they had always been.”

Reconstruction of the living room of Sherlock Holmes

I was extremely impressed with the re-creation of Holmes’ living room at 221B Baker Street in the basement of the museum. It did seem astoundingly authentic and is based on every detail from the Conan Doyle stories that could be culled. It felt to me as if Holmes and Watson had just stepped out for a moment, with the violin and newspapers left lying around and the fire burning, the lamps lit, and the intriguing corners full of Holmes’ experiments and notebooks. When watching the Jeremy Brett TV series, I had never felt that the living room was really Sherlock’s – I kept thinking “I’m sure he wouldn’t have chosen those curtains – was it Mrs Hudson’s taste?’ etc. But in this museum’s re-creation everything felt right straightaway: “the old landmarks were all in their place.”

Foot of Sherlock Holmes statue

Later in the week, I noticed that the feet of the main statue of Sherlock in the town were shining in the rain, the brass looking like the foot of the statue of St Peter in the Vatican that is touched and kissed by pilgrims. Is this how Sherlock’s feet have been worn to a shine??!! Hopefully the fans’ devotion is not that extreme!

But the main surprise came on the first night. At dinner some of our fellow guests at the hotel began to peer out of one of the windows in the corner of the room as it got dark. When asked why, it turned out that there was an image of Sherlock Holmes being beamed onto the side of the mountain near the Reichenbach Falls. I could hardly believe my eyes – it was like a Bat signal over Gotham City! It was a small circular image that changed every minute or so, alternating between two different profiles of Holmes with his trademark deerstalker and pipe. It turns out I could also see this from my room, although my camera failed to capture it properly – it just looks like a pinprick of light in the centre of the picture, although one can see how large it is compared to the lights of the town below.

Sherlock image over Meiringen at night (the pinprick of light in the middle!)

It was rather strange, to have that image watching over us, like a beneficent presence. If any proof were needed that Meiringen had taken Sherlock Holmes to its heart, this was it. I began to wonder what the town would actually be like without this added literary aspect. It is certainly a beautiful place and the hotel and food and Swiss trains were fantastic, our guide charming and delightful, and our fellow travellers fascinating and super-friendly, so I think we would have had a marvellous holiday regardless. But there’s no doubt that Sherlock and his adventures at the Reichenbach Falls do give the town of Meiringen an edge over its competitors it wouldn’t otherwise have, and I am delighted that not just the Swiss but people from all over the world can enjoy what Conan Doyle obviously saw in the dramatic beauty and story potential of this historic place.

But of course Conan Doyle’s short story ends with Holmes and Watson now based back in England again, as am I: “once again Mr Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complex life of London so plentifully presents.”

It’s been a privilege to be able to follow in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes on such a wonderful holiday. Hopefully there will have been plenty of inspiration for my own future writing of murder mysteries in this great tradition.

I have loved Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories for years, since student days when my friends and I would read them out loud to each other and relish the marvellous language, laugh at the unintentional humour, and of course enjoy the wide-ranging adventures. We also were great fans of the Jeremy Brett TV series, who became ‘our’ Sherlock, just as much as Basil Rathbone was for an earlier generation and Benedict Cumberbatch is for today’s. And as a murder mystery writer myself, it’s easy to view Sherlock as a kind of patron saint of fictional detectives.

So when I was given the chance to go to Switzerland, in the very footsteps of Sherlock and his faithful Watson (and of course, before them, Conan Doyle himself in 1893), I decided to make the most of it and compare my own ‘adventure’ with the original stories. This begins with “Adventure XI – The Final Problem”. Watson was writing this after “that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill.” Moriarty’s brother has been bad-mouthing Sherlock in public and so Watson feels he has no choice but to defend the honour of his great friend by writing a true account of the events of third and fourth of May 1891 in Meiringen, Switzerland. “It lies with me to tell for the first time what happened between Professor Moriarty and Mr Sherlock Holmes.”

Holmes had come to Watson’s consulting room on the evening of the twenty fourth of April, in an unusually nervous state, having been in a fight and concerned that someone is out to kill him. Watson knows him well enough to take this seriously when Holmes proposes that the doctor should “come away with me for a week to the Continent”. They then have a attempted secret, fraught and complex journey that ends at the Reichenbach Fall at Meiringen in Switzerland with the seeming death of Sherlock Holmes at the hands of Moriarty, today, the fourth of May.

I have just returned from my week on the Continent, a journey that included 30 separate train journeys and felt almost as fraught at times as Sherlock and Watson’s! We weren’t being pursued by murderous maniacs but it could feel scary climbing up snowy mountain passes and overlooking gorges thousands of feet deep as we explored the same terrain in Switzerland. Apparently it was “not in Holmes’ nature to take an aimless holiday”, nor is it in mine, and I am delighted to be able to share with you some of the amazing scenery and historic sights that form the backdrop to this most famous detective story.

On that April night, Holmes gives to Watson a detailed description as to how he is to get to Victoria station in London where they are to meet up on the train: “the second first-class carriage from the front will be reserved for us.” On our trip last week, we too had to take the equivalent of Watson’s brougham (a taxi) to the station but were to travel instead with ‘Great Rail Journeys’ and leave from St Pancras International on the Eurostar to Brussels, however it was usually the first class carriage at the front of the various trains that were reserved for us as we shot across the continent.

Eventually.

We arrived at Eurostar to find they had mysteriously voided our tickets (our wonderful and unflappable guide said this had never happened before in her experience!) and we had to wait half an hour to be re-instated. But Watson’s relief that “my luggage was waiting for me, and I had no difficulty in finding the carriage” I’m glad to say was usually our experience after that wobbly start. S and W get off the train at Canterbury as they are being followed, meaning to go to Newhaven to cross to Dieppe, fooling Moriarty with luggage labelled for Paris. The intention is to “make our way at leisure into Switzerland, via Luxembourg and Basle.” This was exactly our route, although “at leisure” is hardly the way to describe our one-night stay. Again, there were no master criminals on our trail to stop us, only several thousand students demonstrating in Luxembourg at an unearthly hour of the morning (for students), blocking our way to the train station (just across the road). There were several occasions when I could sympathise with Watson at this point in the story, “looking rather ruefully after the rapidly disappearing luggage-van which contained my wardrobe…”. There was also the same problem as when to snatch snacks at the various stations and stopping points. Sherlock is well-known for always interrupting Watson with the promise of adventure when he is just about to eat. Watson must have groaned inwardly when Sherlock declares: “The question now is whether we should take a premature lunch here, or run our chance of starving before we reach the buffet…” You and me both, Watson.

Instead they too make their way to Brussels, then on to Strasburg and Geneva. Holmes tells Watson to return to London, as Moriarty now has nothing to lose and is a desperate man. But “it was hardly an appeal to be successful with one who was an old campaigner as well as an old friend.” Watson is determined to be faithful and not let Holmes go on alone, whatever the cost.

Tiny spring alpine flowers

They have a “charming” week wandering in the Rhone Valley, going through the snow of the Gemmi Pass by way of Interlaken to Meiringen. “It was a lovely trip, the dainty green of the spring below, the virgin white of the winter above…”

Interlaken

But of course Holmes cannot forget that they are hunted men. Near the Daubensee a large rock is dislodged and falls down next to them from the ridge above. Holmes is not depressed by this, however, but seems to exalt in this ultimate competition of two great intellects and strategists. “Again and again he recurred to the fact that if he could be assured that society was freed from Professor Moriarty he would cheerfully bring his own career to a conclusion.”

“It was on the 3d of May that we reached the little village of Meiringen, where we put up at the Englischer Hof…” in 1891.

Park Hotel du Sauvage

This is where we also stayed – now called the Park Hotel du Sauvage,

Furniture at hotel

and still with many of the period details of the time.

Hotel where Conan Doyle stayed in 1893

And the plaque to prove it…

View from hotel window

We had large rooms with stunning views of the mountains. My room looked out on the Reichenbach Fall area itself.

Reception at the Park Hotel du Sauvage

Like Watson and Holmes, we found that all the Swiss running and serving in the hotel spoke excellent English. Watson wrote that at the advice of the owner of the hotel “on the after noon of the 4th we set off together, with the intention of crossing the hills and spending the night at the hamlet of Rosenlaui.” (I was amused to be given ‘Rosenlaui’ as the codeword for the day to use the wifi at a local institution).

Watson continues, “We had strict injunctions, however, on no account to pass the falls of Reichenbach, which are about half-way up the hill, without making a small detour to see them.” This week we were very glad of a mini-bus to take us up the hill as we knew it was an hour and a half to make the steep walk back down again.

Reichenbach Falls 2014

Conan Doyle’s description of it as “a fearful place” was true as to the rock formations – basically when you looked down – but when you looked up at the falls itself, instead of a “torrent, swollen by the melting snow”, we only saw a small rivulet of water (someone unkindly described it as “the Reichenbach Trickle”). We were wondering whether Conan Doyle had seen it later on in the year when more snow had melted, but no, he seems very precise about it being on the fourth of May. So this is rather a mystery in itself, unless global warming is to blame.

Beneath the Reichenbach Falls

There was “an immense chasm” underneath but the rock did not look particularly “coal-black”, nor was there a “boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip.” The waters did look green, but there wasn’t a curtain of hissing spray that with the swirling water could “turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamour.”

Restaurant at Reichenbach Falls

If we did go giddy it was due to less oxygen than usual at that height, plus the need for tea or coffee at the local restaurant, fortunately situated on the path back.

View from Reichenbach Falls

Of course, Holmes and Watson are ‘tricked’ by a fake message about someone who needs the doctor’s help back at the hotel and so Watson writes: “As I turned away I saw Holmes, with his back against a rock and his arms folded, gazing down at the rush of the waters. It was the last I was ever destined to see of him in this world.”

Or so he thinks…

Swiss Flag at Reichenbach Falls

Part Two will look at the impact of Sherlock Holmes on Meiringen and the amazing way that this small Swiss town has taken him to their hearts.